Yes, you can bet on that. 🙂 A stone cold certainty.
Less than £15.00 (Sterling) for 3 hours of combat action fun.
Then there’s the replays. Say, 3 times altogether at different skills.
£5.00 a play. I’ll buy that.
Bring it on.

I had to answer NO, as after thinking about the question, the economics of the times don’t add up.

As of 24/09/10
$20 = £ 12.79 or 15.33 Euros

Going back a few years, for a lot of people $20 would be no problem for 3 hours entertainment but with the current climate many have to question the validity of every penny/cent they spend and justify it.

Action packed does not necessarily make a shooter worth the money unless it’s new and innovative. Over the years there have been many games that have been advertised as the greatest thing since sliced bread and not delivered, leaving people to wonder why they wasted their money.

Unless it was a previously highly rated game with a proven base of high reviews such as those offered by http://www.sold-out.co.uk/default.asp I would prefer to keep the money in my pocket.

I hear ya..lol. No it’s not a cheap fate for me either. I live in a 700 usd world on 650 usd. I feel your pain, but now and then you have to treat yourself.
I have found out through this hand to mouth life I’ve been trapped in that if you just wait the price of the game, any game will come down. The HL Eps 1&2 have come down to $4.99 each. So far I am still trying to figure out where the 10 bucks will come from. But it will come..
Peace out
Dusty

I paid an average of $20 for two copies of Orange Box, so the same money for something that will only last 3 hours? Sorry, no. the most I’ve paid for a game in the past year or two is $42 for Metroid Prime Trilogy, which still comes out to about $14 per game, all of which are well over 3 hours in gameplay length. (probably 8-12 minimum)

About the only way I could justify a purchase like that is if it supported online and offline coop perfectly, and also included some decent puzzles too.

There’s so many action packed games that are longer and more re-playable. I guess I’m also in that sort where I really like RPGs and the longer a game lasts the better. But I know that a lot of old games will give me more bang for my buck and for longer that it’s not worth just settling for low standards.

Why can’t video games give me a powerful, high-density experience, so that after 3 hours I am satisfied, I feel like I have had enough?

This reminds me of SiN: Emergence, a game I bought for around 15€, lasted for maybe three hours and left me totally satisfied. So, I’m down for more stuff like that any time!

By making the game longer, developers can charge more and then maybe they can make a profit and the consumer feels they are getting value for money.

The old saying that quantity doesn’t imply quality applies here. If the game is not very good you’re not going to want to spend too much, or any, time playing it and there’s no telling in advance how the game is going to be perceived by the audience. Making a bad or an average game last longer doesn’t make it better. This is why going with the average is a safe bet.

(I also don’t see any trend toward increasing length. If anything, the opposite has occurred.)

Yeah, I’ve got to say, I don’t think there’s a trend toward increasing length at all. Some games, especially RPGs, certainly pride themselves on being dozens of hours long, but your typical action title only runs 8-12 on average. Modern Warfare 2’s campaign was ridiculously short at less than 4 hours.

If nothing else, games are getting shorter because the cost to produce assets has skyrocketed between console generations. As I’m sure the Black Mesa Source people have found out, it’s much easier to build featureless cube offices than it is to make a modern, realistic office with interactive props, high-res models, normal maps and so on.

I voted no. I normally wait for full-length games to drop to $20 or less before buying. Since I have plenty of these in my filing cabinets that I haven’t touched yet, I would not consider it worth my money for only a 3 hr experience.

I put yes cuz hey, MW2 only lasted 3 and a half hours for me and that cost me 30 when I got it. Whether I’d do it again, idk, it wasn’t overly painful as there was a fairly large span of time between me buying it and playing it, cuz I was all wrapped up in Dragon Age and mods when I picked it up (about 4 months after release) but if I’d bought it, ran home, played it, and 3 and a half hours later stood up again with the campaign all done and dusted, I might have said “wtf”…

Logically my head tells me no, but I’m not always 100% logical with my game purchases.

I do realize the effort developers put into their games, and their need to make money, but they would sell far, far more copies of their games at the $20 price point, even if the game were mediocre. And for $20, 5 hours gameplay and repeatability isn’t an unreasonable request.

When I got HalfLife2, as a birthday gift, it was $40 at the local WalMart, and I was screwed for the first year I owned it because my Internet connection wasn’t up to snuff and I could never download the updates/decrypts to run it. And when I took it to a friend’s house to borrow his internet, his machines infected mine with a particularly nasty virus that ended up taking a reformat to eliminate.

So far, most games I see on the shelves are in the $50-ish range, and I just cannot justify that. And I won’t justify a 3-hour game for $20, either: I’ll just wait for the sale or the bargain bin.

On 29th November, one lucky reviewer will receive a copy of The Flame in the Flood, courtesy of RTSL reader Jan-Philipp, by writing a review of TeleportVille.
The review MUST use a recommendation image and be of sufficient length. It will be a random draw.

To learn more about the Special Releases Review Giveaways and other giveaways, please visit the Game Giveaways page.